Che’s Way

Scenes from a revolution.

The new Steven Soderbergh film, “Che,” begins with a pair of boots. More than four hours later, that is pretty much how it ends, too. The first boots belong to Che Guevara (Benicio Del Toro), who is wearing them, together with his trademark combat fatigues, while being interviewed in Havana, in 1964. He wears the same outfit later that year, in New York, as a way of indicating, to the United Nations and to any bien-pensants who can gaze at him without drooling, that even in this city of chatter he remains an undaunted man of action. The second pair of boots, by contrast, is the last thing he sees, as he dies on the floor of a Bolivian hut; they belong to the officer who has come to check that Che, caught and shot, has finally given up his troublesome ghost. The visual echo is a fitting one, since, whatever the private impulses that fired this work, there is no doubting Soderbergh’s desire to shoot at ground level—not to linger on the loftiness of political ideals but, instead, to get down amid the dirt, sweat, and despair of putting them into practice.

The movie is actually two movies, excitingly titled “Part One” and “Part Two.” They had a brief run at the tail end of last year, to qualify for Oscar nominations; now, at their leisure, they are enjoying a wider release, and, for that full revolutionary flavor, I would recommend seeing them back to back, with a pit stop for a mojito in between. As to whether we really need two movies, well, Eisenstein used the same scheme for “Ivan the Terrible” (there was a third, which he barely started), and it seems only fair that Che the Implacable, who packed a good deal into less than forty years on earth, should receive a similar treatment. Mind you, anybody who goes to a double bill of “Che” expecting a handsome survey of his life, as I did, will be surprised by what’s not there. Nothing about the budding of his radical beliefs, which was rather too lovingly captured by Walter Salles in “The Motorcycle Diaries” (2004), starring Gael García Bernal as an improbably gorgeous Che. Nothing of the rebels’ entry into Havana, in early 1959, with Che at their head and Batista, the cowardly tyrant, already fled; “Che, Part One,” teasingly, is a triumphus interruptus, halting just short of this spasm of joy. Nothing of Che’s own tyrannical tendencies, as witnessed by the hundreds executed under his auspices during the revolutionary tribunals, or of his calamitous period as president of Cuba’s National Bank. And only a whisper of his entanglement in the Congo, in 1965, which he himself described as “a failure,” and which somebody—Werner Herzog, perhaps—might care to dramatize in a future film, although its Conradian futility might be hard to take.

So what are we left with? Two separate stories, in essence, with occasional trimmings. “Part One” begins by hopping across three locations in as many minutes: Cuba, in 1964; newsreel footage of Batista’s seizure of power there, in 1952; and Mexico City, in 1955, when Fidel Castro first meets Che and discusses an armed overthrow of the Batista regime. After that, things settle down, and the bulk of the story, apart from occasional flash-forwards (in granular black-and-white) to the American trip, covers the training and the deployment of guerrilla forces in Cuba, where Che arrived in 1956. The guerrillas start in the Sierra Maestra mountains and wind up assaulting the town of Santa Clara, in the middle of the island, wresting it from government control. “Part Two” gives no more than a backward glance at Cuba; the opening passages flow like a spy thriller, as our hero slips from public view and enters quietly—in the guise of a bald, bespectacled badger, having shaved his beard and pate—into Bolivia, where the rest of the tale unfolds. There, in his final effort to foment revolution, he takes one nom de guerre after another; even as Che becomes Ramón, though, and as Ramón becomes Fernando, the legend of Guevara adheres ever more unmistakably to its plinth.

Throughout the films, we are given precise dates onscreen, and the writers, Peter Buchman and Benjamin A. van der Veen, have clearly delved into a wealth of documentary sources; it was news to me that Che smoked an avuncular pipe as often as a sexually smoldering cigar. The over-all effect, however, is at once scrupulous and vague. We are sometimes given information that we don’t require, such as the map of South America at the beginning of “Part Two,” which helpfully points out places like Chile and Brazil—at best, a nod to Che’s vision of the continent as one giant tinderbox, awaiting the spark of insurrection. At other, more crucial times, the information isn’t there when we need it. In the second movie, for example, one of Che’s lieutenants is told that his brother has been killed in battle, and the scene is signalled as an emotional jolt, yet it passes in such haste that we can scarcely work out who the bereaved man is, let alone the deceased. (By now, after months in the open, the guerrillas are all as hairy as one another; you have to peer through the matting to discover which warrior is which.) Major figures come and go, diverting the plot without registering much of an impact; a woman called Tania (Franka Potente) hooks up with Che in Bolivia, and carelessly gives away her identity to the police (“five years of lost work,” he says), but nothing in “Che” tells you that she was trained as a German agent, reportedly working for the Russians. I am aware that Marxist doctrine demands that combatants subsume their individual selves in the common cause of defeating imperialism, and that may well be the key to guerrilla warfare, but is it also a helpful way to run a movie?

The principal distinction between the films is one of pace and hue. The first installment proceeds calmly through its jungle greens to the blindingly bright walls of Santa Clara, and violent events, like the derailing of a trainful of soldiers, or the execution of traitors and liars within Che’s ranks (he was without compunction, or indeed compassion, in such matters), are choreographed with lucidity and care. The second movie is both more sombre and more jittery, with its thirst-sharpening tones of scrub, sage, and soil, and an overwhelming sensation, from the start, of a cause simply waiting to be lost. (It’s like “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” shorn of all glamour and fun.) You cannot instigate popular revolt without the consent of a people, and Soderbergh allots a number of telling scenes to Bolivian farmers and soldiers, their suspicions of a godless foreigner—Guevara was an Argentine by birth, and by now stateless in his appeal—outweighing their hopes of a just society. Set against this are sequences in which Che, who had a medical degree, administers aid to a few isolated sufferers; the thought that his bourgeois profession may have done more practical good, during this last hurrah, than his wild proletarian ardor is an irony, I suspect, in which Soderbergh is more than happy for us to share.

All of which raises the question: why did Soderbergh make these movies? Like Jon Lee Anderson’s 1997 biography of Guevara, they show not only a mastery of proliferating detail but a hard-won moral poise. For followers of Guevara, Del Toro’s performance will confirm their faith in the Comandante—decisive in deed, wheezing with chronic asthma but never complaining, and staunchly bookish (he tells a battle-weary subordinate to stop resting and do his homework). His sympathies for the poor and the maltreated are unstinting to the end. Skeptics, meanwhile, will point to the arc of the twin tale, which leads as if by natural logic from dream to disillusion: look at Che, they will say, standing on a mountainside and showing his fellow-rebels their destination, which turns out to be a sea of sullen fog. Look at the great liberator, reduced to a slovenly tramp, parked on a village bench, miles from the nearest metropolis, with his pants held together by string. No one should confuse this with hagiography. “We will have become human waste,” he tells his colleagues in the Bolivian uplands, later advising one of them “to live as if you’ve already died.”

It’s a wonderful line, hinting simultaneously at everyday hopelessness and at a possible grab for immortality, and Soderbergh is smart enough to give both tendencies room. Nonetheless, to forge a long, dispassionate film about a man lit by passion above all else is a curious enterprise; Roberto Rossellini was not far from this, in his bio-pics of Pascal and St. Francis of Assisi, but he was a man with “Stromboli” and “Rome, Open City” to his credit, so his acquaintance with the anatomy of the passions was well attested. But Soderbergh came to “Che, Part One” straight from “Ocean’s Thirteen,” which is like the Rat Pack turning up in “Reds.” It would be comforting, and tidy, to suggest that the director had waited all his life for the chance to make this film, as if it meant everything to him; yet I still have no idea what truly quickens his heart, and at some level, for all the movie’s narrative momentum, “Che” retains the air of a study exercise—of an interest brilliantly explored. How else to explain one’s total flatness of feeling at the climax of each movie? Nobody around me looked like cheering at the victorious end of “Part One,” or suppressed a sob as “Part Two” petered to a close. “He would rather face a soldier than a journalist,” somebody says of Guevara. How would he have faced a film director? Hard to say, but I think he would have wanted a fight. ♦